More Lives Are Saved by Defensive Gun Uses Than Taken by Criminal Gun Uses

By Bruce W. Krafft. May 7th, 2017

Here's a fact you'll never see in mainstream media accounts of "gun violence" in America: defensive gun uses save more than twice as many lives than the number lost in criminal gun uses. Here are the numbers:

According to the Kleck-Gertz study from the mid 1990s, there are between 2.1 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGU's) annually.

Now there are a lot of people out there who deride this number as ludicrous. But they're unable or (more likely) unwilling to accept that Dr. Kleck is not a shill for the Gun Lobby™. This, despite the good doctor disclosing in his 1997 book Targeting Guns that . . .

The author is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic candidates.

He is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or contributor to, the National Rifle Association, Handgun Control, Inc. nor any other advocacy organization, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.

But skeptics gotta skeptic. Antis prefer their own "reality." So let's go ahead and throw the K-G number out in favor of something more conservative.

Let's use the numbers from the study commissioned by the Clinton DoJ shortly after the K-G study was published.

That study was conducted by Drs. Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig, longtime proponents of strict gun control. It concluded that there were 1.46 million DGUs per year.
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Anti-gun pundits just love to downplay the "guns save lives" mantra, instead claiming that mere possession of a firearm somehow equates to death and destruction. Not only is the right to self defense itself sacrosanct but, with many attackers being cowards, the mere knowledge of a potential victim being armed can be enough to send them running. That is way more common than actual shots fired.